Chartbeat

Parse.ly, one of the major players in the growing business of sophisticated measurement of digital audiences, is out with a new suite of services this morning.

“The conversation around what success means and how we measure it” continues to develop, CEO Sachin Kamdar told me in a phone interview. Eleven new Parse.ly metrics, like “breakout of traffic recirculation” aim to give publishers a range of tools they can match with differing objectives, he said.

The concept, according to the company, is to unify insights on growth (as still measured by uniques and page views), engagement (as typically demonstrated by time spent) and the newer concern with loyalty (described by several as “time well spent” in my earlier piece). Read more

For years, publishers couldn't identify the source of a hunk of their traffic. Chartbeat this week "flipped a switch on its real-time dashboard to place that traffic in its proper bucket"; “We saw mobile Facebook traffic increase by about 40% on sites with big Facebook presences,” its chief data scientist, Josh Schwartz, said. (Marketing Land) | "The only question is how much Facebook traffic you’re not counting," Alexis Madrigal writes. (Fusion) | "Dark social comprises only a small percent of overall desktop traffic, but commands a fairly significant chunk of mobile traffic." (Chartbeat) | "That kind of dependence on a single site raises all kinds of issues." (Gigaom)

J-school student arrested in NYC Garner protests

City University of New York grad student Desiree Mathurin reported on a protest at the Brooklyn Bridge Wednesday night and got popped with 82 others.

That’s real progress. But plowing through dozens of articles and interviewing a few key sources, I have concluded that it is way early to declare victory and a new day dawning in digital measurement. Read more

Minneapolis Star Tribune ran an ad bashing transgender kids: The Minnesota Child Protection League ran a full-page ad Sunday in an attempt to influence the Minnesota State High School League, which may “approve a new policy that would allow transgender students to participate in athletics based on their gender identity.” Strib VP Steve Yaeger tells Aaron Rupar: “The ad in question met all the requirements of our ad policy.” (Minneapolis City Pages) | Earlier this year the Strib took some heat for how it reported on a transgender person.

In a blog post, Schwartz observes a decrease in mobile traffic correlated with the Facebook outage:

As I discussed in my last post, a huge percentage of mobile traffic comes from Facebook. Given that, we’d probably expect mobile traffic to be hardest hit during the outage. And, indeed, entrances to sites on mobile devices were down 8.5%, when comparing the minute before the outage to the lowest point while Facebook was down.

Traffic to desktop sites, meanwhile, actually increased by 3.5 percent, Schwartz noted: “While we certainly can’t claim that the outage was the cause of that uptick in desktop traffic, the timing is certainly notable.” Read more

For most publishers, less than 10 percent of June page views came from traffic to evergreen articles — stories that were more than three days old by Parse.ly’s definition.

Among the publishers included in the analytics company’s data: Upworthy, Conde Nast properties, The Atlantic properties, Fox News, The New York Post, Mashable, Slate, Business Insider, The Daily Beast, The Next Web and The New Republic.

Nearly half of the publishers see less than 5 percent of their web traffic attributed to content that is more than three days old, according to Parse.ly:

Unsurprisingly, Parse.ly found that topic-specific sites generally received a higher percentage of traffic from evergreen stories than breaking-news sites did. Upworthy doesn’t include timestamps in its stories, and many of Slate’s pieces are less time-sensitive than stories from The New York Post or Fox News and thus more likely to have a long shelf life of shareability. Read more

— Media critics weren’t critical enough of Aaron Kushner’s print-centric strategy at the Orange County Register, Clay Shirkywrites, helping to poison the minds of young people who need to understand that print is in a death spiral from which it can’t recover. Read more

Last year 46 million Web users visited New York magazine’s pop culture site, Vulture, for the first time. Of those, 7.6 million came back at least once. To use a term and concept that free news sites haven’t widely adopted, that’s a 17 percent conversion rate.

Because few media organizations without hard paywalls are focusing on what they can do to retain first-time visitors, it’s hard to put that number into context, said Michael Silberman, NYMag.com’s general manager. But he sees that 17 percent as a baseline from which Vulture can grow.

“I see tremendous value in that gap and in figuring out how to identify those among the 46 million who with the right nudge would be most likely to want to come back again,” Silberman told Poynter via phone. Read more

So we are two-and-a-half months into the year, and I am sorry to report that uniques and its evil twin, page views, are still with us — offered as the basic yardstick for digital audience for both individual sites and whole industries.

But I took cheer last week when three separate sources made the case that attention and engagement matter more. Read more